One of the downsides of using Azure Automation runbooks is the visibility of the runbook-outcomes. That’s one of the few downsides I could actually find when I wrote my “Running database maintenance on Azure SQL DB with Azure Automation” post. But because we execute the runbooks against our production environment, visibility is of high importance to us.

To get some more insights into this, I’ve implemented a try-catch block in every runbook we have, and send an email to our ITOps team when a runbook fails. So how did we do this?

Create an email runbook
To keep it a bit modular (and I know it could be set up even better), I’ve made a runbook that is only used to send an email to our IT Operations team. This email includes the runbook name and the error that occurred.

Because we are going to include sensitive account information in a Azure Automation runbook, it’s a wise idea to store the username and password of your Office365 account into a “Credential” in Azure Automation. This safely stores your account information, and allows you to use that in your runbook later. This option can be found in the Automation Account’s left menu.

This runbook sends an email from “no-reply@domain.com” to “ITOPS@domain.com”, and includes the input parameters (RunbookName and MessageBody) in the subject and body of the email. You can customize this based on your preferences.

Call the runbook
The way we use this runbook is by calling this from another runbook that runs our database maintenance. This runbook is copied from this post, except for the try-catch block.

By adding the $ErrorActionPreference and try-catch block, it’s possible to receive an email if a runbook fails:

I’ve included a bunch of “Write-Output” lines in there, so that if I test it through the Azure portal I can see the status of the runbook. You can remove those if you want to have a clean runbook of course.

Conclusion
By using PowerShell to automate this type of work its easy to extend your jobs like we did. Adding an email component is just as easy as altering the payload in your runbook. This extensibility and modular approach is the way to go, if you want to deliver a solution that is easy to maintain and scalable.

And let me tell you something, that PowerShell is going to be big someday, mark my words! 😉

In one of my previous posts I wrote about Azure Automation jobs to run your Azure SQL DB maintenance processes. This is a very easy way to schedule your maintenance, but there are some shortcomings when you look at the scheduler options and job outcome visibility.

In this blog post I’ll show you how you can schedule your runbooks through webhooks. Then you’re not bound to the minimal schedule of once per hour, that is a limit set for Azure Automation schedules.

Start with a runbook and webhook
In this post I’m using the runbook that I previously created for running database maintenance. Before I created a webhook, I removed the schedule on the runbook itself. This is to prevent confusion on which schedule started the runbook.

Now that the basics are set, click on the “Webhooks” button, and click “Add Webhook” in the blade that opened:

A new blade opens up in the portal, and this blade allows you to create a new webhook. Give the webhook a name and an expiration date (which is mandatory, even though you don’t want it to expire), and copy the URL. You need to store this in a secure place, because it will only be visible in this windows while creating the webhook. It can’t be found anywhere else if you loose this URL:

The webhook URL will look like this (this specific URL is changed, and won’t work): “https:// s2events.azure-automation.net/webhooks?token=eT0%0bKvfBcMeusbZw00RAwP0ZKGqxEUnThBIHAEB0Eq0%0d”

The webhook is ready to use, so now we can move on to creating a schedule.

Create a webhook scheduler
Just by creating a webhook alone the job will never run. In order to do that, we need to create a “Scheduler Job Collection”. In the Azure portal you need to go to “Scheduler Job Collection”, click on “Add”, and give your Scheduler Job Collection a name. If you already have a Job collection you can add this one to it, or create a new one. Now go to “Action settings” to configure the webhook URL for this scheduler:

Make sure you set the action to “HTTPS”, and the method to “Post”.

Under “Schedule” you can configure the actual schedule. As mentioned earlier, the schedule of a Azure Automation runbook can only be configured in hours. The schedule of a Job Scheduler can be configured in minutes, so this allows you to run a job multiple times an hour in case you need it:

Conclusion
In some cases, it might be needed to run an Azure Automation runbook multiple times an hour, but that’s (currently) not supported for runbooks. By using the webhook and job scheduler as a work-around you’re able to make the runbooks just a bit more useful. Before using the job scheduler, we were required to duplicate runbooks and configure the schedule to run on specific times, but this only made things more unclear. This works out for us, and hopefully for you too!

Running all of your databases in Azure SQL DB (the PaaS solution, also known as Azure SQL database) is a wonderful thing, except for one thing: you still need to run database maintenance. And because the SQL Server Agent is not available (which is a shame in my opinion), you have to find a way around that.

Azure Automation
Microsoft gives you a tool to automate your processes with something called “Azure Automation”. With this tool you can schedule “Runbooks” that contain PowerShell. This allows you to execute the stored procedure that is executing the actual maintenance on your database.

Creating a runbook
In order to create a runbook, you need to login to the Azure portal, navigate to “Automation Accounts”, and create a new account:

When that is created (this usually only takes a few seconds), open the accounts, and click “Runbooks”. Click “Add a runbook” to create a new runbook, choose “Create a runbook”, and give your new runbook a name:

It is important that you choose “PowerShell Workflow” as Runbook type.

Adding the script
In this example I use the scripts I blogged about earlier. This allows me to just execute a single stored procedure to kick off the maintenance process.

By adding this to the Runbook a connection to the specific database is opened, and the stored procedure is executed:

To start using this Runbook, you don’t only need to save it, but also publish it:

Schedule
Now that you have a Runbook, you can schedule it to run at the time you want it to. You can do that by clicking on “Schedule”, and either create a new schedule or select an existing one (if you want to use a schedule you created earlier):

Conclusion
The Azure Automation is easy to use, and allows you to do almost anything on Azure by using PowerShell. But the only downside I found until now is that the job output and outcome is kind of tucked away into Azure. There’s no way to send out an email when a job fails for example (which was the setup we used on-premise).

There must be a way around that, but I haven’t found that until now. But if I do, that sounds like a good follow-up blog post! 🙂